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Engineering a Greener HVAC System
Creating a greener Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning system and water heater using biomimicry, green materials, and wasted energy.
Author: Cale McCollough
Copyright 2019 (C) Cale McCollough; all rights reserved (R).
Consult your personal license for permissions and restrictions.
This document is an open-source research innovation in the works created live in a Wiki for all to see, warts and all. The innovation described in this research article is called the Oregon-Cooler, and it began in 2015 as a water desalination machine utilizing different biomimicry processes, but over the years grew to become a Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system.
This document is currently a template and is getting filled out. Please come back later. Thanks.
Homes today are mostly heated by fossil fuels, electricity, and natural means. Natural gas methods are cheap but release a lot of gas into the atmosphere.
Oregon is a very humid place and evaporative coolers don't work very well here. One method to use an evaporative cooler is to dehumidify the air before using the evaporative cooler. In winter, there is also a lot of humidity from the rain that can damage homes. Traditional dehumidifiers work great, but they use a lot of electricity and the compressors produce a loud noise.
[Insert blurb about how trees consume the most carbon when growing then they stop sequestering carbon then they are large.]
Our solution is to use the tubes in trees that carry water from the root to the leaves and solar-powered fans to create hot and cold circuits in the log. This requires the logs have lots of holes drilled in them so you can create a giant tube out of the tree, and blow air through it in a configuration that wicks the water from one side to the other. All that is required is for the sun to be shined on the wood to use solar energy to evaporate the water in the dry circuit when the fan blows air through it.
Salt has one property about it that it absorbs water from the air. This can be exploited by drilling lots of holes in the logs horizontally, and alternating a dry/hot and humid/cold circuits, and using plastic tubes to connect every other circuit together to create a very large pipe with half wood and half plastic. This has the effect of maximizing the surface area of the wood in contact with the air, and we put salt in the cold side so the water will absorb into the salt, absorbe through the tubes in the log that carry water from he roots to the leaves, and get evaporated by the solar-powered fan on the dry circuit. We well-designed plastic tube can be hidden in the tubes and also be quickly driven in by single hammer strike.
These logs can be configured in a variety of different ways. One can bury the logs vertically underground and create a walkway with black rubber tops, or they can be used above ground covered in black paint to maximize the solar heat collection and surface area. When used above ground the trees can be used to attach things onto, and we will use them in the other innovations in this article to mount insulation.
Way too many people are lazy about insulating their windows in the wintertime, they want to keep their blinds open in the summer for natural light. One method to insulate sun-facing windows is to attach an outdoor greenhouse to the side of the home and use thick reusable clear plastic window liners. A table with 4 straight legs on each corner can be used to put plants on, and wood boards can be attached to the side to create a pet house for your dog, cat, rodents, etc, which also will increase the temperature of the greenhouse area. The plastic liner for the window can also be thermally coupled to the pet house so that any heat that leaks from the windows will provide your beloved ones with heat, or in the summer if you have AC then it will cool the pet house and thermal connection the ground can be swapped from cool to heat mode by placing a pet pad.
Heating water in homes currently uses a MASSIVE 18% of the home's electricity usage, most of this energy being used to heat the water from cold to warm. One method to increase efficiency is to create a "water fence" between two homes that share an East-West fence section. The water preheater fence is built from a large clear double-pane rectangular glass or plastic box that is thin, less than 1/4 meter wide, and is lined with black half-circle solar collector tubes placed that rotates perpendicular to the ground about the length the tube, which we define as the a-axis, that creates a fence that you can't see through that pre-heats water that can be shared between one or more homes. These tubes only need to rotate about the a-axis, twice per day, which is the most energy-efficient method to rotate an object. The double-pane windows insulate the water with a vacuum seal so the unit can be used year-round. The higher the water fence the more hot water there is to be had. so larger water fences can be created to increase privacy for places in your yard where neighbors can uncomfortably see each other in their yards; which can be creepy even if your neighbor is cool.
An air conditioner or refrigerator can be used by putting very large diameter pistons in the road with springs pushing the piston up that move up and down, compressing a refrigerant. Pipes under the road are connected to buildings nearby supplying the building with both hot and cold air that can be used for heating, cooling, and refrigeration.
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The Oregon-Cooler is a collection of source-available open-source products that are designed to force individuals to use everything they have and locally available green materials to save and collect energy from a number of different modular methods that all use the same low-or-no-carbon parts that are distributed by mimicking and exploiting Amazon's distribution pipeline as well as shipping pipelines. Every aspect of the Oregon-Cooler is custom-built by real people in the real-world who all tackle Global Warming together by creating a more beautiful home out of wood and green building materials. The Oregon-Cooler is not just our innovation, it's your innovation. Our innovation is to provide a business infrastructure that can minimize the entire carbon footprint using as many recycled materials as we can scrounge up.
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This section is where you recapitulate the problems with the prior State of the Art, clarify your innovation, summarize your benchmarks, and draw your conclusion that shows people why they care about your innovation. Drawing a conclusion is like drawing a picture, you first sketch the outline as fast and neat as possible, then you fill in the drawing with the most important details first, followed by displaying the symbols that refer to your optimizations (like Lemas, algorithms, names of drawings, names of techniques, etc), followed by quickly brushing over the background before you lose their attention, and finally the follow-through where you show them why they care and now just why your numbers look good.
Here is where you talk about the future research you intend to do based on this paper.
If you have any feedback, please submit issues in the form of an Issue ticket to the Oregon-Cooler GitHub repository located at https://github.com/kabuki-starship/oregon-cooler.
Kabuki Starship is a mostly open-source organization in need of contributions. If you would like to contribute to the Oregon-Cooler project, please donate to Kabuki Starship using the PayPal donate button below: